Blurred
by PrInCeSsFBi
Summary: "You did this, Clint." It was like he had been hit all over again, the air ripped from his lungs in such a vicious way that he didn't notice it until he suddenly couldn't draw another breath. He looked down at his hands, covered in blood from the hallway, red staining his prints.


**Disclaimer: I do not own Avengers ... even though my phone is filled with Clint pictures**

Clint "Hawkeye" Barton was used to waking up in a lot of weird places, which was why he wasn't to surprised that his comfortable bed had been replaced by cold unforgiving floor. He stood, stretching his limps, as he got his bearings. It was dark and his eyes struggled to adjust. That was the first thing that sent a red flag to Clint. His eyes were trained to handle the dark. He reached up to feel for a blind fold but felt nothing except the prickle of his eyelashes. The dull ache in his head was also strange. Not one from being hit in the head or anything, Clint had plenty of those to tell the difference, but something he couldn't quite grasp.

He felt his breath quicken as the tales of guys who had gone blind from too many knocks on the head haunted him. Was he blind? He couldn't be! Everything he lived for involved his eyes.

"Calm down." Clint muttered to himself bracing himself against a wall. He wasn't blind. No, it was just really really dark. Taking stock of his injuries, the ache of his skull and ghost of tension in his muscles, he figured he had come unscathed so far. Which meant he hadn't been held because let's be honest, Clint being held by someone unknown never ended with him just having a headache. He could handle this. It was always something with these guys. Whether he was leverage or they wanted him for his skill, whoever was behind it would come out in the open soon enough. Clint didn't plan to stick around long enough to find out.

He pushed his hand forward and felt nothing but wall. He shook his head trying to knock his remaining senses into some form of functioning. The wall beneath his palm would shift from rough concrete to smooth paint and in the dark he couldn't distinguish between the two. If he could find a door he could try and listen to the sounds outside his cell but he…

Suddenly a loud hiss sounded and Clint jumped back with a cry at the sudden brightness shifting the light in the room. The change in light was too quick for him to brace himself and his eyes felt like they were burning. There was a gasp and Clint fell on his instincts lashing out at his attacker before making a break for the door. Clint cringed at the brightness and he rubbed at his eyes trying to return his vision. He needed to see. The pain was unbearable and his head screamed at him making his body betray him. His legs barely held his body up as he staggered into a wall before picking a direction and ran. They had gotten the jump on him and he needed to regroup.

Clint rounded a corner, pressing his back against the cool wall as he gasped for air. What had happened that made him so out of breath from a sprint? He survived an alien invasion for Christ sakes!

His friends.

Clint wasn't alone now. He had become sort of a piece in some rag tag team of crazy people who fought aliens for a living. Were they here? If he could find out what happened to his friends than he could form a plan to get out of here. But he needed to be able to see first, damnit!

Taking a calming breath he slowly lowered his hand from his eyes blinking long and even blinks. The room blurred with each blink before bits of details sharpened causing the stabbing pain in his head to continually curse at him. His vision remained blurred and he could tell he was squinting. Whatever the hell happened before Clint was willing to admit it took a good beating out on him. His body sagged against the wall as he ached bone deep. The ache from his head down to his neck had him trying to rub whatever source of pain was causing his stomach to twist violently within himself and the light wasn't helping matters. He subconsciously checked his pockets for his shades but shook out the ridiculous notion. Focus.

"Keep moving." He commanded himself in a slurred speech. Bracing himself against the wall he forced one foot in front of the other. The walls from what he could tell were gray and bare and the lights were off but it was bright. Brighter compared to the darkness he had been in before but somewhere light was pooling in so Clint went that way.

He was drugged. That much he knew for sure. It was the only thing that made sense. His body wasn't injured but it was as if he was walking on one leg. The light made him dizzy that his hands began to tremble along side the wall. Yes, definitely drugged. What the hell happened?

His bare feet on the slick floor were cold and the only thing keeping him awake. His body screamed at him to just find a corner to curl up in and sleep but he couldn't. He had to make sure his friends weren't in danger too. Then he could fall unconscious. Safety first, sleep later. Wait… didn't he already have this train of thought? Clint blamed the lapse of concentration on the drugs.

The wall kept jumping from underneath his palm and he narrowed his eyes. Training his ears for any type of activity he stopped, his body propping itself against the wall in relief. The wall continued to buzz and move it took Clint a moment longer than it should have to realize that it wasn't him but the wall itself. Pressing his ear against the surface he heard the faint whizzing of metal and what sounded like a screaming garbage disposal.

Tony.

Clint shoved himself away from the wall taking for a sprint down the hallway and further into the light to help his friend. Thor, Bruce, and Steve didn't wear metal suits and Natasha would die before someone had the satisfaction of earning a scream from her. Stark wasn't trained in hand to hand combat as well as the others and Clint was pretty certain that anything tried on Bruce would have the Hulk answering back. He had to help.

Clint skidded to a stop, bracing himself against the wall. He sucked in a deep breath, his lungs burning just from his sprint. He counted to three and just as he was about to jump into a fight the screaming sounds stopped.

"I'm busy," A voice said irritably. Clint peered around the corner to see if he had been caught but he only saw one man, Tony nowhere in sight. He clenched his fists, struggling against the anger boiling inside of him. They were messing with him, whoever they were. Clint didn't consider himself to have many close friends. Sociable sure even flirtatious but the friend department was always just a small store in the middle of a desert on an empty highway. The chosen few who stopped by Clint held close and these assholes were using his friends to get to him. Were the others even here or was he all alone? He always hated these douche bags that liked to play mind games. Natasha liked them; he just liked to shoot them in the face with his arrow.

"Of course I'm busy. I'm always busy. You all don't think I'm busy do you? Well if you must know I'm in the middle of detaching the mess of a job SHIELD calls an R&D job. These arrows are insulting."

They have my bow, Clint thought clenching his jaw. They were lucky he didn't kill them right then and there.

"Barton's been asleep since those happy drugs they gave him kicked in," The voice said with a long suffered sigh like the fun he was going to have was abruptly taken away from him by a playground bully. "It'll be a while before he's even remotely close to the land of the living."

"Sir, Agent Barton left his room."

"I stand corrected."

"Sir, he would appear to be in distress."

That's one way of putting it, Clint thought.

"Locate the patient will you."

Patient? Was he in a hospital? That would make sense if he was in the hospital from hell. Not even SHIELD medical was this bad. Drugs, he reminded himself, stop talking.

"He's hiding around the corner, sir."

"You're made."Clint turned sharply bracing himself for an attack. But instead he came face to face with Phil Coulson with that calm expression on his face. "Run."

"Hey-" The man on the phone didn't get to finish before Clint placed a well aimed fist, the man stunned into shock long enough for Clint to sprint past him.

"When did you get here," Clint asked over his shoulder but Phil was gone. Rounding a corner he slipped falling in a heap on the floor. His hands came away sticky and he balked at the pool of blood trailing along the floor. There was a crash behind him and he rocked his body back onto his feet, following the trail and jumping into a room. Before he could do anything though he was thrown against the wall a trained hand crushing his windpipe.

"Coulson," he rasped trying to pry the hand off. Phil stared at Clint with a look that sent shivers down his spine, freezing him of his fight. It was filled with hate and disgust and Clint flinched.

"This is your fault," Phil said his tone calm but his expression something of the contrary. He was furious. He didn't release his hold and Clint tried desperately to pull the man off of him.

"What-" But he didn't get to finish before he was thrown to the other side of the room, hitting the wall hard enough to ricochet onto the ground.

"An absolutely waste of my time. I should have been protecting the others but no. I was too busy protecting you," Phil said kicking Clint in the stomach. The air violently left Clint and he curled inward. The young man gasped for air, his stomach lurching and making him heave. "Now they're dead because you couldn't listen to a single order. Always have to go your own way don't you, Clint. Well guess what? You're finished."

"Coulson, your bleeding."

Phil looked down at the wound, blood leaking from his chest and down the front of his white pressed shirt, before staring back at Clint. "You did this."

It was like he had been hit all over again, the air ripped from his lungs in such a vicious way that he didn't notice it until he suddenly couldn't draw another breath. He looked down at his hands, covered in blood from the hallway, red staining his prints.

There was a bang and Clint flew drawing his legs up and climbing the furniture until he was able to cram his body into the ventilation shaft and moved. He was running away from his captors and he was running away from Phil. His breathing was still abnormal, the puffs of air making way through his lips doing nothing to fulfil his need for oxygen and he could feel his chest tighten in panic. The metal walls were closing in and he was trapped. He couldn't get to the others. They were dead. Phil was dead. He was a failure.

There was a huge crash from underneath him and he looked around frantically for something to grasp before he fell to his death in the pit of a black hole where his body would rot either forgotten entirely or used as an example. An object just like he had been back in the old days. Come one come all. Come see the amazing fuck up. His hand made purchase with a boot and he screamed to see Phil's bloody body just staring straight at him, his arms and legs limp at his side like a doll. There was a shake again and Clint was yanked down by his ankle.

There were hands that were touching him, pulling him, prodding him, and suddenly Clint felt the fueled anger inside him. If these guys were going to take him like some prize they had to fight for him. He swung his fists and let a leg swing out before his body crashed to solid ground and there were shouts. Large figures blocked his view of sunlight through wall high windows and he could only use that as his source. There was a curse and then a man, huge compared to the others stepped into Clint's view cutting off his vantage point of the light and was shouting.

The man pinned Clint's wrists with one hand and Clint lost any sense of control he had some how managed to withhold. He twisted and kicked, bucking underneath the man trying to wrench his wrists free but it was useless. He was surprised to realize that the low wounded sound that echoed throughout the room had been from his lips.

The man however let go of Clint's wrists in shock as if he had been burned and Clint pushed back, feeble but enough to send the larger man toppling to the side, before throwing his body into the corner bringing his knees to his chest and covering his head. The look from Phil told him that the dead man recognized the movement for what it is, the instinctive motion that Clint had long buried with his parents, and suddenly Clint couldn't have felt more vulnerable. He had gone from a trained SHIELD agent to the weakling kid he once was crying in the corner and giving up.

"Stop," Someone said, the sound making Clint flinch further in on himself. Another man stepped forward kneeling on his knee in front of Clint his hands held open. Clint glared at them suspiciously, curling his hands under his arms. "Clint you're ok. Look you can move. No one's going to-"

"Don't." Clint hissed, his voice hoarse from his screaming just a few moments ago.

"Clint," The man said in his soft familiar tone. He had heard it somewhere but…he couldn't remember. "Do you know where you are?"

Dead Phil knelt down next to the man with that same calm expression on his face, staring at Clint that sent him cowering back into the corner.

"You're at Stark Tower, Legolas. Remember you moved in after SHIELD grounded you."

"Not now, Tony."

Tony? What was Stark doing here? Clint looked up spotting the small blue dot in his blurred vision. He blinked rapidly, clearing his eyes of the fog that had followed him sense he woke up. Tony was sporting a black eye looking as if he was watching at a cornered animal. Next to him was Steve, bloody nose running down his chin. Clint looked at them in disbelief before rubbing his hands against his eyes with an agitated cry. What the hell?

But when he blinked again the room was sharp and crisp making his eyes hurt and the ache in his head turned into a complete bitch. However, Steve and Tony stood in the same place as before and nothing changed.

"Bruce?" The soft-spoken doctor nodded from his position in front of Clint, Thor standing behind him with a worried expression.

"You had a migraine, Clint. Something went wrong and you started to hallucinate."

The dull ache in his head traveling down his neck. He remembered that. One of the curses of having such great eyesight was the migraines he would get. Everything would get sharper than what they were and Clint was miserable. He got them every once in a while and the one he had right now was taking an ice pick to his brain. But it didn't make sense! He had meds for it and this never happened before.

Phil was still staring at Clint.

"Tasha?" Clint looked around for the red head.

"She's probably hanging that doctor off the Helicarrier by now," Steve muttered. Phil smiled at that.

"Yeah something tells me that wasn't Imitrex they gave you."

"She went to see what happened," Bruce said ignoring the others.

But the others misinterpreted him. It was a call for help. He wasn't strong enough. He couldn't face his dead friend alone. When the red head didn't come to his call it took all of his concentration not to reach out hoping his partner would see that he needed help. He was so damn confused. He had been fighting his friends but they weren't and Phil...

Bruce read Clint's expression.

"Let's get you back to bed."

Steve and Tony hastened forward, each taking one of Clint's arms over their shoulders.

"Next time let's avoid punching me in the face," Tony said trying to lightening the tense mood.

"Tony." Steve glared over at Tony but Tony ignored him.

"I'm just not one of those guys who can pull off the rugged looks-"

Thor watched them go his face troubled.

"I did not mean to frighten him."

Bruce looked up at the ceiling down to the mess of the living room fiddling with his glasses.

* * *

Natasha carded her fingers through Clint's hair as he woke.

"It was Stanley from storage. He thought taking you out would get him a reassessment. He switched your drugs." Direct and to the point as she always was. It was what made them so great. She was strong and focused while he was barely kept together and fringed.

"I see him Tasha," Clint said his voice broken. He didn't see Natasha press her lips together in the grim way that was eerily similar back to the days when Loki had thrown a temper tantrum on Earth. Back when Clint had been unmade with the same haunted ghosts in his eyes.

"Where," She asked instead. Clint pointed at the bloody body of Phil, slumped in the corner like he was in the vents, that vacant gaze staring from under his lashes. Natasha kept carding her fingers through his hair and stared at the place he had pointed until he fell asleep once more into the twitching oblivion that was his nightmares.

**a/n: I'm just that bitch that keeps dangling the freaking carrot aren't I? Sorry it took me a while to get this up guys. I really wanted to get this right and I had orientation for college. That's right I made college! Anyway connects with all three pieces (I would suggest reading Exposed to catch a reference in here though. The others are whatever...but you should still read those). Rant Over! Review!**


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